#nothing in Talah's life gets to be easy

[conclave-of-knives]

Feast/Sleepless - tw: uuuuh body horror? A little. Gender affirming surgery mention

Everything was dark. Blacker than black. Shadows upon shadows, it was as if light itself had never penetrated the space. It hadn't had it? This was part of the void, filled with black, monstrous beings beyond Talah's worst nightmares. He could hear the skittering, but he felt it first. Dropped on his belly, they were slimy yet sharp, bulbus yet scurrying. They burrowed into his flesh, slipped under his skin, feasting on his insides and leaving a disease, a corruption behind.

"Javinth! Help-" Talah whimpered, hoarse from his own screams. Something bigger was pinning him down, sharp stabbed through his shoulder, slicing and peeling the muscle from his arm. The more he fought the heavier the feeling on his chest. Tighter. Cutting and cracking… ripping him open and squeezing down on his ribs until they oozed with bile that just as quickly turned into more tiny skittering blobs.

He couldn't breath. It hurt. More than it had all hurt before. More than training, more than dying. He didn't want to die. He didn't want to be corrupted. He just wanted to be himself he and had worked so hard to become himself. "Make it stop… Dad!"

Suddenly something gripped his shoulders. Something real had him making, equally suddenly, the corruption and darkness seem like illusions. The darkness started to fade, to grey, to warm light. Something comforting was calling him name.

"Talah!" Zaer's voice was stern with worry, but not without warmth, matching the grip he had on the boy's shoulders as he tried to rouse him from the first sleep his son had in days. The first sleep he'd managed to get the boy take since surgery. "Wake up." He ordered.

Talah complied with a sudden gasp of air and a sputtering cough after. He hurt. His chest was still tight, still felt like it was skittering, and chewed through, even now awake he could hear the scratching and clawing in the distance until Zaer spoke his name again; demanded his focus. "You're going to pull your stitches."

It had been three years since the last time he died, almost to the day. Three years of black out, medicated sleep. Three years of medicines and shifts in lifestyle. Three years, putting him nearly to eighteen, he should be able to handle trauma from his childhood. In order to get the results he wanted, he had to forgo the potions that kept the nightmares at bay, but after three long years, he was no more prepared for them than when he returned home.

Once Talah was aware of himself, his father, and wasn't going to try to lash out from his dreams, Zaer's hold on him relaxed and the quiet warrior gently brushed the boy's hair back from his forehead to also check his temperature.

"I'm okay… just another bad dream." Talah flopped back against his pillows with an exhausted sigh. He wasn't getting anymore rest, not this morning, and soon enough it would be time to change the bandages wrapping his new pecks and he had to blink back the internal horror that they would be covered on corrupted black veins. It was just a dream. "Coffee? … maybe pancakes? And bacon?" Talah offered big, pleading puppy eyes at his parent, not that he needed to as the old elf got up to start a new day a bit too early.

"Call for me if you need anything, no getting up until you're healed." Was all Zaer offered like he was one more precious whelp to raise and heal and not like he had spent the whole night nearly sleeplessly worried about Talah; watching over him knowing before too long he'd be all grown up and his job would be done.

@zaerathian @daily-writing-challenge @javinth @batandmole